Urrrrgh. Sounds like the stair in the basement of the place my father’s family lived. Aunt/Uncle on top floor, Granpa/Grandma on ground floor.
Grandma broke bones on that staircase several times. After they both got old and died, my aunt and uncle eventually grew older and they both had various bad accidents on that same damn stair. Damn thing was the curse of the family.
Steep, deep treads, concrete, solid concrete walls with handrails, leading to a concrete floor.
Go up and down it for decades and think nothing of it, then eventually muscles get older and wobblier, reflexes and balance deteriorate and the thing gradually morphs into a killer. But of course it’s still “just the stairs, I’ve been up and down them a thousand times”.:smack:
The slightest mishap and avoiding injury requires a rapid accurate grab onto the handrail with sufficient strength to arrest a fall, which isn’t necessarily easy for someone elderly, especially since they will often be carrying something. Once a fall is underway there is nothing within reach to arrest the fall. Padding the stairs just makes them easier to trip on. Padding the bottom will potentially help reduce some injury (especially from a fall on the bottom steps) but won’t reduce damage from tumbling down the stair treads.
Stairlift or a ground floor extension/utility room/garage are the only real solutions, IMHO.
All the advice given is good. I want to add my 2 cents: use the handrail at all times.
Ten years ago I tripped on a curb because I was in a hurry and not paying attention, and I fell and broke my ankle. I had surgery, and I learned my lesson that day.
I’m 71, totally ambulatory, and live alone in a one-story house. I do have steps on my front porch. EVERY TIME I go up or down those steps, I use the handrail and take it slowly and with awareness of where my feet are. Any time I go up or down steps anywhere and there is a handrail, I use it. Every single time. No matter what safety device you install, you have to be conscious of safety every minute. When I get in or out of the bathtub/shower, I grab something sturdy and move slowly and thoughtfully, noting where my feet are and making sure one foot is firmly planted before I transfer my weight. (BTW, whenever I’m in the bath/shower, I put my cell phone on the floor next to the tub.) A wearable safety buzzer is well and good-- much better never to have to use it.
As for carrying a clothes basket up and down stairs using both hands: :eek:
Going down, I’d be tempted to put the dirty clothes in a pillowcase and toss them down. As for bringing up the clean ones, maybe put them in a canvas bag and drag the bag up the stairs?
Is there anywhere that a dumbwaiter could be fit in?
Doesn’t need to be near the stairs, just anywhere that’s reasonably convenient from both the main floor and the basement so that they can use the dumbwaiter to move stuff back and forth between basement and main floor, and not have to carry stuff while negotiating the stairs.
If you’re thinking of a dumbwaiter, you should at least look into the idea of a residential elevator. Googling, it appears they cost $20,000 and up. Seems like a lot but a broken hip and subsequent nursing home care is super expensive as well.
But before you go there, see if you can eliminate or reduce the need to go up or down the stairs.
Theoretically, money isn’t an issue. My parents can afford a residential elevator, but they’re kind of frugal. I could see them spending the money on a chair system, but I think they’d rather move than spend the money on a residential elevator system.
Also they also have a 2nd story on top of the basement. So they’d need an elevator that can go into the basement and upstairs too.
I think when the time comes, they may move to a one story home. But that may be 5 years from now.
As for a dumbwaiter, its kind of hard to find a quote on google. I’m seeing figures from $500 to $20,000.
Not to be bleak, but you don’t want “when the time comes” to be forced by a fall. If it’s only 5 years away, it sounds like the time to start planning a move is now. (Or at the very least, insisting on a chair lift.)
My mother is looking for a new place now, and I’m pushing her away from everything that’s not a ranch with main floor laundry.
For those who don’t or can’t follow a YouTube link. It’s basically a strong, steel handrail with a secondary support bar that sticks out from the side rail. Lift up on the support bar and it slides easily along the length of the rail. Push back down on the support bar and it locks in place. I’ve never actually tried one and the actual execution may not be that smooth but it might be worth checking out.
I just googled ‘dumbwaiter’ and the top 3 things that popped up were quotes. A couple in the $3200 range, and another just shy of $5000. Clicking on one of the $3200 options indicates that there are a range of options that would affect the price, like the width and depth of the lift, weight capacity, whether you wanted it to serve more than 2 floors, or open from multiple sides on a given floor, what sort of wood or metal finish you want, etc., that could add up to a few thousand more to the price, depending on what one wanted.
I think that’s going to depend a lot on the specifics of the chair rail and the steps. My parents had a stairlift installed to their second-floor apartment after my father had a couple of strokes resulting in paralysis. That chair and rail took up enough of the narrow stairway that I didn’t feel entirely safe getting past it to go up or down the stairs when I was in my thirties - and there wasn’t a doorway at the top of the steps , as is common with basement steps.
If they struggle with stairs in general, then they should probably find a solution which doesn’t require them to use them, like the chair lift.
If they’re still okay with stairs, perhaps you could make the stairs have a 90-degree turn with a landing in the middle. That way a long stairway becomes two shorter stairways. Although at their age, everything is going to be more brittle and delicate and any kind of fall is likely going to have serious injuries. Even a fall from standing position to a flat floor can break bones in the elderly.
My wife and I were facing the same problem. We loved our house that we had lived in for 47 years, but schlepping laundry up and down from the second floor to the basement was becoming increasingly difficult. There was no way to move the washer, dryer, and freezer upstairs. I suppose we could have put them in the attached and partly heated garage, but that was three steps down and the bottom step was quite steep. Already 20 years ago, I put a pair of handgrips on the garage wall. We saw a condo we liked (among other things, it had a washer and dryer inside and we planned to buy a small chest freezer). We moved last summer, had the freezer delivered the day we moved in and have been very happy, at least since we got over the trauma of the move. But each of our kids came to help out for a week, one of them came twice.
Chain them to the basement walls, so they quit climbing out and bothering you?
Somewhat more seriously, at the end, before my parents moved out of their house w/ basement, I believe my dad went up and down the stairs on his butt. And he just planned his day, so that when he went downstairs, he did everything he needed to do before coming back up, as opposed to making multiple trips up and down.
My mom’s mobility was unimpaired, so she carried the laundry up and down.
I moved into a house with a chairlift (basement near the garage --> up to the kitchen) and it was also great for just loading groceries from the trunk into the chair! We would load it up and send it up and it would save us several trips up and down.
Alternatively, I would recommend a railing on both sides. And the other big recommendation I have (actually DuPont and OSHA and every safety conscious company) is to educate yourself about stair safety: No carrying things (if you must, hold it to your side), no distractions, and a hand on the railing at all times.
Maybe you could rig up a winch as an inexpensive dumbwaiter. If they just need to move stuff like laundry up and down, it seems like a regular winch could do that pretty easily. It would be much cheaper than an actual dumbwaiter.
Stair lifts do have a weight limit [I think mine is the standard 250 pounds] so one has to make sure that if you want to carry that case of bricks upstairs, you stand someone at each end and send the case up by itself =) They give you [or at least Acorn did us] a pair of remotes, one for upstairs and one for downstairs so you can call it to whichever end you are not at. I wish my parents had installed one when my dad went in for knee replacement - he wouldn’t have had to set up a bed in the otherwise unused livingroom and bathed at the physio place, he could have seamlessly stayed in his bedroom. I find it amazing, and with my handicap status could not live here without it.
And I will occasionally use the stairlift as a stair aid down, because I have a basket of something on the seat, I find down infinitely easier than up =) a single bakner box of books will put the weight over the limit. I do believe they have one that goes to 500 pounds.
